Developeronomics and the Rise of the Internet and Software

There was an interesting article recently in Forbes titled The Rise of Developeronomics by Venkatesh Rao. It talks about software developers and how important it is for companies to hire and hold on to the best ones.  One interesting claim is that good software developers are not just somewhat better than the average developer, they are often 10x better than the average one, and can make a very big difference to a company.

The most interesting quote, however, is how the development of software has been changing much of the economy, especially once the Internet was developed:

Speaking of history, let’s put all this in perspective for non-software-industry types who still don’t understand just how epochal the birth of the software industry is for the rest of the economy.

As Alan Kay, a major pioneer of today’s software-eaten planet,  pointed out recently, the Internet doesn’t have stop, shut down, or rewind buttons. Once it was turned on,history was essentially rebooted. Software began eating away at the pre-software layers of civilization on the planet, and depositing software-infused layers instead. 

One of these days, we’ll recognize the enormous significance of what’s going on and replace the BC/AD distinction with BI/AI (Before Internet/After Internet), with January 1, Year 0 reset to October 29, 1969, the day the Internet was turned on (if you want to start right, 2012 is actually Year 43, AI).

And yes, this time, there will be a Year 0, if programmers have anything to do with it.

This type of argument suggests that the technological singularity is happening now, and we're living in the middle of it. It's taking a few decades, but that's a blink of the eye if you take a longer term historical perspective.

Relativity Denial Returns

When I was much younger, I recall that refuting the Theory of Relativity was a favorite pastime of various crackpots and clowns. The Nazis even derided it by referred to it as foolish “jewish science” and obviously inferior to proper “aryan science”. (Einstein was a Jewish German if you didn’t know). In reality, most aspects of Relativity have been experimentally confirmed, some in extreme detail. The current GPS system even has to take into account the effect of relativity in order to achieve the accuracy it does.

In more recent years, the attention of the crackpots seems to have become focused on refuting evolution and more recently global climate change. Have people given up battling against the Theory of Relativity?

Thanks to a recent article on Talking Points Memo, I found out that the answer is a definite “no”. Conservapedia (the alternative to the reality based and thus liberally biased Wikipedia) has a detailed article on Relativity. It’s initial criticism states that “…unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity consist of complex mathematical equations relying on several hypotheses.”

It gets worse. It’s accompanying article Counterexamples to Relativity describes Relativity as “heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world”. It states that Relativity denies action at a distance, which clearly contradict the miracles that Jesus performed according to the Bible, so Relativity must be wrong.

The closing arguments in the original Conservapedia article include the following whopper of a paragraph:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion. As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments. Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common. Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

Relativity denialism appears to be more alive and well than I thought, and the battle against science continues. By the way, the main contributor to the Conservapedia articles on Relativity was Andy Schlafly, son of the right wing activist Phylis Schlafly.

What Are Our New Big Mega-Projects?

A recent article in the NY times commented on the lack of any big mega-projects being undertaken. The article points out that in the past we had “The Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad.. the Hoover Dam, the Interstate System, the subway networks in San Francisco and Washington, the Big Dig in Boston ... and the list abruptly stops. For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way.” Such big projects, the article suggests, can have transformative effects and create significant long term improvement for the economy.

Ok, an interesting observation. But do we really have no big mega-projects under development at this time? Or are the current really big projects just somewhat different than those of the past? I would argue that the biggest development project for the last decade was the build-out of the Internet. This required enormous investments in effort and money, generated significant wealth, and is having an incredibly transformative effect on our economy and our society. I will argue that the long term transformative impact of the Internet and related technologies will transform society much greater than the transcontinental railroad or the interstate highway system. It was government funded, at least at the beginning, though private funds have taken over the still on-going build-out. The current focus now seems to be shifting to the phase of integrating the rest of our communication and business structures into the Internet infrastructure. This is also different form the past mega-projects in that it is global in scope.

What other major mega-projects are now underway? It could be argued that transforming our health care system is one such project. This also suggests another big scientific mega-project that we are in the middle of – understanding and learning how to manipulate genomes. Understanding how DNA operates and controls living organisms, and how to manipulate it is certainly a major effort that will eventually have long lasting economic and social transformative effects on our society.

If we want to focus on more physical projects though, the biggest mega-project we have just started is clearly the transformation of our energy system away from a fossil fuel based system to one that is based on less carbon intensive and more renewable fuels and overall greatly improved efficiency. Government has an important role to play in this, but like the Internet, private funding will eventually have to provide most of the funding. I’d like to think of this as the great physical mega-project of the next 20 years for our society. Its effect on the economy and our society are likely to be profound. It's something we can rally around that should be generating much more enthusiasm and pride than a comparatively limited project like the transcontinental railroad ever could.

The IBM / Syracuse / NY State Green Data Center, and the Interesting Trends it Illustrates

On May 29th, IBM Syracuse University, and New York State announced an agreement to build a new energy efficient computer center on the Syracuse University Campus. Through an interesting combination of techniques, this center will use about 50% less power than typical computer data centers, making it one of the most efficient computer centers in the world. Some of the key techniques used include:

• On-site electrical co-generation system that will use natural gas-fueled microturbine engines to generate all electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers.
  
• IBM's latest energy-efficient computers
  
• Use of chilled water coolers to directly remove heat from the computers much more efficiently than trying to chill the entire computer data center.
  
• Using waste heat from the electrical generation system to provide heat and cooling for both the data center and nearby buildings.
  

Beyond the technical issues, there are some interesting observations about the future trends that this illustrates.

(1) It is yet another example of the significant improvements in efficiency that are possible in our systems. Typical of such examples, it requires a “systems approach” that focuses on efficiency from the very beginning of the design.

(2) It is yet another example of how innovation is often best produced by a hybrid combination of corporate / educational / government organizations working together. (The original development of the Internet itself is another example of such such an alliance.) Reliance on a complete “free market” approach to innovation is based more on promoting an ideology than examining the actual historical data about what works the best.

(3) This is an interesting result in terms of the benefits of distributed power generation. Power generation systems must be big enough to achieve reasonable economies of scale. Yet they should be local enough so that power distribution losses are minimized, and so that the “waste heat” produced can be utilized for other purposes in the community.

(4) Timing - the announcement was made in May 2009, and the data center is expected to be completed by the end of 2009. This is an interesting result in terms of “right sizing” projects. Very large power generation stations can take many years to complete and bring on line. Nuclear power plants can often take 10-12 years. The ability to bring new technology and techniques on line very quickly is a major reason why modest sized projects are likely to be a major trend. Since technology change is accelerating, the ability to exploit new technology quickly will become an increasingly important factor.

Pew Research on Evolution and Religion

The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life recently published an interesting article on the public attitudes towards evolution among various religious groups. Interestingly, the religion with the greatest acceptance of evolution was Buddhism at 81%. Unitarian Universalism was not listed in the groups of religions, but I suspect they may be even higher because of the emphasis they put on science and reason. The lowest group listed? Jehovah's Witnesses at 8%. The article also listed a number of other useful links to related resources.

People often ask "Is evolution a theory or a fact?" It's confusing because it's actually both. It is considered to be an observed fact from the fossil evidence that life started out as a comparatively small number of simpler forms, and over time gradually evolved into a larger number of forms including some of which are very complex. There have now been a number of cases where the evolution of new species in nature have actually been observed over the course of many decades.

However, the explanation of how this happens, natural selection operating on random genetic changes, is the theory part of evolution. This theory is very well supported by the evidence and is about as well confirmed as the theory of gravity. Yet it continues to generate a great deal of conflict in the public sector because of it's theological implications. Unfortunately, I don't see this conflict being reduced anytime in the near future. According to the Pew research, only 48% of the US population accepts evolution as the most likely explanation of the origins of life on earth. Other polls suggest that this number has actually been declining over the last two decades or so. This is an indication of how much trouble people will have adjusting to the rapidly changing understanding of the world brought on by the exponential growth in scientific knowledge and technology.

Growing Conflict Between Science and Fundamentalist Religion

There may be little or no conflict between science and some religions. I'm a member of a local Unitarian Universalists congregation and I personally don't see any conflict between the teaching of that religion and science. However, there are some real and undeniable conflicts between science and some of the more fundamentalist religions. The conflict over accepting the facts of evolution is one of the more well known examples. But this is just a warm-up to the new conflicts starting to surface regarding the mind and morals.

Before Darwin, the existence of complex living things was one of the best arguments for the existence of a supernatural creator that directly intervened in the world. Once evolution was understood, we now know that complex life can be explained without the need of such a supernatural creator. This argument has been replaced by the existence of the conscious intelligent human mind in general, and our moral system in particular, as the remaining best argument for the existence of a supernatural creator. As we understand more and more about the physical basis for how the mind operates, this has generated a growing backlash by religious fundamentalists who assert that the mind is some sort supernatural thing separate from the physical brain. A good summary of this movement was recently provided in an article in New Scientist Magazine titled Creationists declare war over the brain

Going beyond the basis for consciousness, there is a large amount of progress being made in the last few decades understanding how human morals can naturally arise and how many of our moral "feelings" actually have their basis in our physical brains and were produced by evolutionary processes. Progressive religions will be able to deal with this just as they came to terms with evolution. But it is even more damaging to the claims of fundamentalist religions than evolution itself, and they would probably be fighting against this even stronger than evolution if they fully understood the scientific progress being made in this area. I expect that it will be only a mater of time before the science vs. fundamentalist religion conflicts shifts to focus on the natural basis of consciousness and morals.

Falling Behind China's Energy Policy

While China and the Olympics is on everyone's mind, here is an interesting set of comments on China's environmental policies from Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp.

China, he said, already leads the world in manufacturing solar energy panels. Next year the country will become the world's top manufacturer of wind turbines. Rogers said China is creating the technology and developing "the creativity and the brain power to blow by the United States" on green energy. And it is creating jobs for its future. “They are making it happen while we are still talking about it...It’s time the United States and its leaders — including the two presidential candidates — face the fact that this country can no longer claim to be a leader on global-warming and clean-energy issues."

When you add up the cost of what the United States squandered by its decisions in the last decade or so, don't forget to include this.

The Singularity on IEEE and Andrew Sullivan

The singularity, to oversimplify it somewhat, is the concept that science and technology are achieving such rapid exponential growth that there will come a time in the next few decades where this growth achieves such runaway speed that very little about what society is like beyond that point can be predicted. I discuss this and related topics in a little more detail in my presentation Sustainability or Apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil is one of the more famous authors to write about this. His most recent book is The Singularity is Near – by which he means around 2045.

The subject of the singularity has long been an esoteric topic of the futurist community, but lately it has been achieving some great public exposure. The IEEE Spectrum magazine, which is well respected for its covering of technology issues, has devoted the entire June 2008 issue to the Singularity. It is available online here. I started reading it recently and will comment on it in the coming days. There are now plans to make Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near into a movie. And the most recent appearance of the singularity in the popular press has been on Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish, which is one of the most read political blogs on the web.

I have set up “Google Alerts” for both Singularity and Raymond Kurzweil, and there has been a definite increase in the frequency of references to these two topic across the web. By the way, “Google Alerts” are a great way to watch for new developments in any topic of interest. I highly recommend them.

Science is a way of life

I have a degree in science as do some of my friends, and I've noticed when talking to non-scientist that we seem to "think differently" then they do at times. It's not a situation where we simply know more background facts than the other person and so come to different conclusions. It sometimes seems to be a more fundamentally different way we approach problems, evaluate evidence and reach conclusions. And I believe that it's due to the training we have in science (and math) that we integrated into our lives.

Part of this is employing a healthy dose of skepticism, part is knowing that there can be a big difference between what we want to be true and what really is true, and part of this is knowing that the facts can sometimes point to one true answer (or at least firmly eliminate some options) and that everything is not just "a matter of opinion".

It is interesting to note that at no time do I consciously decide to "look at something from a scientific perspective". It's something that is so integrated into my way of thinking that it applies to almost everything I do. Believe me, the way I evaluate which clothes to buy in a store can drive my artistic wife up the wall :-)

With that in mind, I read an interesting Op-Ed by Brian Greene in the NY Times today (He is the author of “The Elegant Universe”). In the article he comments that:

It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances.

He further explains:

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

It's disappointing, and a failure of science education that this feeling is not more widely shared. The full op-ed is available here.

Ben Stein's view on what science leads to

Ben Stein is the producer and main actor in the movie "Expelled", which is a propaganda piece promoting intelligent design. Ben is a well educated and seemingly intelligent person, so his production of this movie is disappointing enough, but even more depressing is the following quote from him during an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

"When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you."

I listened to the actual interview to see if really was as bad as it sounds, and it was. There was an additional jewel not mentioned in the above quote. He talked about the need to promote the teaching of alternative religious based theories of how life began, the origin of different species, and what keeps the planets in their orbits. Planets in their orbits?

We are facing an exponential growth in science and technology that is much bigger than what we experienced in the last century, and yet there are people who are still having trouble accepting the radical scientific advances from Isaac Newton in the 1600's. Ben Stein is not alone in this. This suggest a growing (exponentially growing?) cultural gap within society about understanding and accepting the scientific advances in the coming years. My hunch is that our advancing knowledge of how the human mind works and the nature of our moral instincts will be the next big new area of controversy.

By the way, the interview of Ben Stein is at http://tbn.org/video_portal/ . Click on "Behind the Scenes" and look for the April 21st show. It's a 30 minute video, mostly promoting Ben's movie. The above quote is near the end.

10th Anniversary of Blogging

There was a short piece this morning on NPR radio celebrating the 10th anniversary of blogging. The series will continue all week. Ten years ago the term weblog was first coined, which was shortened into blog. It is estimated that there are now about 100 million active blogs, with another 100,000 added per day. There are also an estimated 200 million blogs that have been started and abandoned by users that experimented with them for a while.

This is an excellent example of the increased rate of change now happening. Ten years ago people only a very small portion of people knew what the term blog meant. In one short decade it has become a pervasive aspect of our society, along with its other variations of user generated content sites. Who could have predicted the arrival of MySpace, FaceBook, or Youtube ten years ago? Or that the US Senate would change hands because of a Macaca moment?

It's very hard to predict what the next ten years will bring in this area, since the rate of change keeps increasing. Two thoughts on its general characteristics though:

1) There will be more personal information being made available by people on the web. This will not trigger the fear of loss of privacy that you might expect, because it will be information that is controlled by the individual.

2) There will be a growth in the ability to establish one's reputation, or check on people's reputation. This is an absolutely vital part of the functioning of humankind's off-line society, and is desperately needed as part of the on-line society in order to sort through the unlimited amount of content available on the web.

By the way, the most popular blog in the world? It is run by Xu Jinglei in China according to a Wikipedia entry. Yet another sign of the times.

The Future of Technology roundable at the Philoctetes Center

I had the pleasure of attending a roundtable discussion on “The Future of Technology” at the Philoctetes Center in NY City this weekend. It was not a comprehensive overview of technology issues, but there were some thought provoking discussions. Here is a summary of some things I found interesting:

PlayStation-3 is essentially a supercomputer in a box. We will soon have a supercomputer in a packet, coupled with pervasive access to everything from everywhere. We will be able to set up real time video monitors that call for help when an elderly person falls, or when someone in a pool seems to be drowning.

Another development is that everything about you will become more available to everyone. You will become more of a public persona, no longer the private individual the way you used to know it. One of the great urges of culture is to spread your virtual genes around, your name, thoughts, opinions, memes… This is already happening with FaceBook and MySpace. This is not generating a fear of the loss of privacy because the key aspect of these is that people have control over what information about themselves is made available.

Internet culture is a form of an extended childhood for adults. It goes back to the very early childhood phase dominated by fantasy and imagination, before the discovery of limits.

The human social contract was discussed in detail as something that can trump and control the exploitation of new technology. Unfortunately the social contract is not evolving fast enough to always keep up with changing technology. It is often difficult to figure out how to apply social norms (and formal laws) to new technology. They are adopting though. An example was given about a fraud suite pending in court for something that happened in the 2nd Life virtual world. This was viewed as something completely natural and reasonable by the panel. Another example of a development that the social contract will have trouble adjusting to - in 20-30 years it will become standard to know your genome and understand much about it.

Some aspects of technology use bring out the good and bad in people. Blog comments tend to bring out the worse in many people, for example. 50% of them seem to be just cruel personal attacks. The important thing in controlling poor behavior, and in judging the value of content, is the idea of “reputation”. We need a better way to establish and communicate online reputations. Anything with anonymous sources tends to be problematic.

While many of the poor behavior discussed has its roots outside of the online technology, the internet has lowered the barrier to creating fraud and deception on a massive scale.

Our physical metabolism craves sugar and fats, but you can get sick when you have an unlimited supply available and you don’t learn to restrict yourself. In the same way, our mental metabolism seems to have certain cravings that can be supplied in unlimited amounts online or in electronic games, and we can become psychologically sick when we don’t restrict our consumption of these. Additionally, the fact that you can tailor you online world to feed your phobias and prejudices is creating additional problems.

Will You Marry a Robot?

I couldn't pass up commenting on this article by Roland Piquepaille. It seems that David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher, will publish a book in November titled “Love and Sex with Robots.” Levy claims that within a few decades, we will be able to produce robots that are so human like in their appearance, functionality, and in their expression of human-like emotions, that many people will be falling in love with them, having sex with them, and even marrying them.

I suspect that people will consider this possibility either very interesting, very disturbing, or both. Is it realistic? People do have a strong tendency to mistakenly project humans qualities into non-human things and develop emotional attachments to them. Consider how common it is for people to treat pets as if they were cute little human children. Admittedly pets are emotional beings that people can develop relationships with, but all too often people mistakenly project too many human characteristics on them. It seems like a natural tendency we have.

People claim they "fall in love with their cars" all the time. (Personally, I have enough trouble developing relationships with humans. I never understood how people can develop strong emotional attachments to a hunk of rusting metal that you will discard in a few years, but I digress...) I think it's only a matter of time before people develop emotional attachments to computer controlled mobile objects (i.e. robots). Sexual activity with them could happen well before this. The market for this is potentially huge.

Is this a good or bad thing for society? I've heard that there is a declining trend in some Muslim communities for men to marry. They instead "marry their television", which is a slang expression for turning their attention to the newly available porn available on satellite TVs. This also suggest that adult version of online virtual reality ( "2nd Life", or other big multiplayer games) is a huge market just waiting to be tapped. The potential for addiction is great here, and the impact on the ability to develop relations with real humans is something to be concerned about.

So computer related sex - yes, it will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated than today's online porn. Computer marriage? No. Marriage is a different type of thing. It is a commitment on a deeper emotional level between humans with all their idiosyncrasies and faults. It is a commitment to share finances, goals, emotional support, sacrifices, physical support in case of accident or illness, and to grow old together. This is not the relationship you have with non-human things. I'm not sure I want to sacrifice to meet my robot's needs, which is a fundamental aspect of marriage. I expect the preferred relationship with robots will be more like a friendly servant - potentially one with "side" benefits.

The Noisy Restaurant

Humans have a great ability to pick out a conversation and understand it in a noisy environment, such as at a restaurant or a party. Computer speech recognition is gradually getting this ability too. I recently read about a new development in computer speech recognition that allows it to listen to multiple conversations in a noisy environment and actually understand what was happening in each of those multiple conversations. Why not? Once it can understand one conversation in a noisy environment, it makes sense that duplicating some hardware should allow it to understand multiple conversations.

This brings some interesting situations to mind. Imagine a robot waitress (waiter? what's the correct term for something without a gender - waitred?) taking orders at a table. Instead of taking turns giving their order, each person could speak up simultaneously and announce their orders all at the same time. It would take some getting used to, but it's fun to think about.

That leads to the question of what other capabilities such a robot waitress could have that don't necessarily mimic human capabilities exactly. For example, arms that are more flexible and extendable with additional joints for placing food dishes directly in front of people on crowded tables. How about the ability to see in all directions (360 degrees) at the same time to better keep track of all the customers at different tables? No need to limit it to two eyes. Science fiction films too often portray robots with physical characteristics similar to humans, but that just shows a lack of imagination.

Addendum: Here's an even stranger one that might be a little hard to grasp at first - there's no need for each of the robot waitresses to have a "separate mind". They could all share the same mind, linked to their bodies by radio communication. Then you can grab the attention of any robot waitress walking by, and they will be able to respond to you with exactly the same familiarity as the original physical robot that greeted you when you first sat down.

The Demise of Professional Sports

Some people have predicted that professional sports as we know them have at most a decade left to exist. It turns out that they may have been too optimistic.

The reason behind this prediction is that the use of performance enhancing drugs will become more and more widespread. Already new designer drugs are appearing faster than they can devise tests for them. And within a decade genetic engineering will produce dramatic athletic improvements while being essentially impossible to detect.

If you look at the news today from the Tour de France, I currently count three teams that have pulled out due to illegal drug use, and the current leader, Michael Rasmussen was just disqualified. The race is becoming a contest of who has the best chemist, with the chances of winning without the aid of performance enhancing drugs growing dimmer each year. The Tour de France, as we knew it, is just about over.

And in baseball, Barry Bonds is about to break the all time home run record with what clearly seems to be the aid of performance enhancing drugs, rendering that record almost meaningless. Before long it will become routine for someone to hit over 100 home runs in a year.

Try to imagine football with 300 pound quarterbacks and linemen routine exceeding 500 pounds. Where is this all going?

Perhaps the basic contradiction at the heart of professional (something done for money) sport (something done solely for fun) will reach a point where it cannot be overcome or hidden behind a fantasy any longer.

Priorities for NASA and others

In a recent article in Wired Magazine (June 2007) by Gregg Easterbrook proposed the following set of rational priorities for NASA, in descending order of importance:

1. Conduct research, particularly environmental research, on the Earth, the Sun, and Venus (the most Earth like planet)
   
2. Locate asteroids and comets that might strike Earth, and devise a practical means for deflecting them
3. Increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe
4. Figure our a way to replace today's chemical rockets with a much cheaper way to reach Earth orbit.
   

Sounds like a very rational set of priorities to me. But here, according to the article, are NASA's current priorities:

1. Maintain a pointless space station
2. Build a pointless "Motel 6" on the moon.
3. Increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe
4. Keep money flowing to favored aerospace contractors and congressional districts

That's only 1 for 4 in getting the right priorities, and the two most important ones are missing. One of the key aspects of leadership is the ability to set the right priorities, since you can never do everything you want. One of the key failures of the current national administration, as illustrated in the above lists, is the inability to properly set a reasonable set of rational priorities.

With that in mind, I can't help adding my own following list of what our national priorities should be in terms of addressing the biggest threats from rogue states and terrorists groups:

1. Al-Queda
2. North Korea
3. Islamic revolution in a nuclear armed Pakistan
4. The "loose nukes problem" in Russia
5. Iran
6. Iraq

Guess where the vast majority of our effort and resources is focused? Talk about a good illustration of the problems that arise from not setting reasonable rational priorities...

Recording Your Life

In New Jersey last fall, 16 year old Matt Leclair started objecting when one of his public school teachers promoted his fundamentalistic religious beliefs during class. When the teacher denied to the principle that he did that, Matt took out a recording he secretely made in class that clearly showed the teacher doing what Matt claimed. The school took immediate action to make sure this would never happen again - they banned students from recording in class again. (To be fair I believe they also told the teacher not to make such religions statements again too).

Thanks to rapidly developing technology it's going to be possible to record more and more aspects of everyone's daily life, so get used to it. The school was a little naive to think they could actually ban such recordings. Students can now by a mini MP3 player that can also be used as a tape recorder. These things are so small that it's impossible to prevent students from bringing them into school and recording what happens without conducting exhaustive strip searches each morning. And the technology gets better each year.